An application program for managing a datacenter runs on a server and can be accessed through a network by a system administrator with a client device such as a laptop computer running client software with a graphical user interface (GUI). Often, the GUI for the client software is integrated with web-browser functionality.
The application program for managing a datacenter enables the management (including load balancing) of many host servers running many virtual machines each having many virtual storage devices such as virtual disks or virtual network interface controllers (NICs).
Multiple object models in the form of graphs can be used to represent the physical resources (e.g., datacenters, host servers, etc.) and virtual resources (e.g., virtual machines, virtual disks, etc.) managed by an application program for managing datacenter resources. In these graphs, a node might represent a resource (e.g., a host server) and an edge between nodes might represent a relationship between resources (e.g., between a host server and a virtual machine). Of course, such graphs tend to be complex, both in terms of the number of nodes involved and in terms of the number of edges between those nodes. Consequently, the graphs do not lend themselves to extensible display in a GUI.